With a growing amount of people on the planet, and an increased awareness of the ecological damaging potential of those people, it is important to make eco-friendly electrical apparatuses, since there are coming evermore electrical apparatuses on the market (e.g. electrical toothbrush instead of manual brush; a single internet query costing as much power as an hour light from an eco light bulb). There is an important, to be continued, trend to at least make those apparatuses as energy-friendly as possible.
For televisions, this has led to the consideration that a television may be switched off dependent on some criterion (e.g. the passage of time), automatically (this could be seen as a kind of advanced user interface/remote control/on-off button, if it were to be dependent on some user behaviour).
However, whatever interactive switch one may come up with—irrespective of the cost—fact remains that some or many people may not want to switch the t.v. off. The inventor posed the question: “If one sees those people reading a book, and the television remains playing, are these people really so lazy to even after half an hour not get up and switch the t.v. off, or do they knowingly choose to have the t.v. on, e.g. a single person, to have a cozy atmosphere?”
Such an automatically off-switching apparatus would hence not be one according to the desire of its (potential) owner, so there would be a need for something else, extra, in the market.